Marketing Execution: How You Slow Down Or Screw Up

Let’s talk about your business a second here: You start off with all that excitement and gusto.

You take huge risks, and you take a leap of faith (leaving a job or letting go of your comfortable corner). You are prepared to go the long haul, and you even turn your comfort zone on its own head by investing time and resources before money comes in (regular folks who do day jobs don’t have to do that).

Then comes in the actual work you’d need to put in – all that hustle, self-management, managing others, managing finances; hiring people and managing them; making sure products are stocked, shipped, and delivered; or delivering services on time.

Isn’t that all a lot to do? It is. Entrepreneurship is incredibly hard (God only knows what you’ve been told). Some entrepreneurs keep ticking and they do what they can.

You really don’t need a social media manager unless your name is Seth Godin.

Let’s take organic marketing for consideration:

You’d only have to blog 2-3 times per week, each week. The priority is to get started. While you are at it, you’d then try to find out if there’s a freelance writer or an agency that can replicate your efforts and take over blogging as a service.

Social media management? You can work ahead of yourself and schedule all your social media updates with tools like Hootsuite and Buffer. To start with, you don’t need anyone else. If you want to save 2-4 hours each week, you can then easily find a Virtual Assistant to do this for you.

With robust and smart email marketing tools today, you don’t need any help for email marketing. There are plenty of email marketing automation tools and services available, do you seriously need an “Email marketing manager”?

Note: With Drip, you can launch multiple campaigns or autoresponders for every offer and then create email automation workflows to have your subscribers reach one or any of your products or services. All this is done automatically, after you set it up.

You wouldn’t even have to think of PPC marketing unless your budget accommodates that or if you can wait until your Inbound marketing efforts start to pay off.

Hiring is Secondary; execution comes first

Consider this: let’s say you run and manage a restaurant. You usually sit at the billing counter.

Say a customer walks in but there’s no there at the door to usher the customer in and seat them at her table.

What do you do?

Do you tell the customer, “Wait, let me see if I can hire someone quickly to help seat you at the table?”

No, you wouldn’t. You’d welcome the customer, exchange pleasantries, give a smile, and you’ll seat her at the table.

Take a business online, and somehow this same scenario won’t work out.

Business don’t blog because they’ve been thinking too much, or waiting for the perfect writing team.

There’s a nasty habit some entrepreneurs have: if work needs getting done, the first thing they’d do is to go looking for “help”.

It becomes a priority and a feverish obsession. So much that you’d actually set the actual projects or the tasks pending (despite a looming deadline), and end up spending all the time or effort to “look for someone who can do it”.

Really?

You think way too much

Most businesses don’t start digital marketing (or marketing of any kind) because they don’t think they have the funds (see point 1) or because they wait until they find the perfect team (see point 2). Most others don’t start (or don’t do it well) because they overthink.

Should I use wordpress or what?

What hosting is the best hosting?

Blog posts should have great headlines, should 1654 words in length. Each post should start with a keyword, end with a keyword, and swipe off into the oblivion with a keyword.

Use American English, Indian English, Australian English, or UK English? Don’t use this word or be sure not to use that word?

Exactly 5 updates on every social account, per day or generally trying to time your social updates so much that you don’t even post anything on social at all?